In the 1920s radium was a health fad: the mysterious element that glowed with its own energy was bottled, blended, and sold as the energy it seemed to promise. Radium clinics, radium chocolate, radium toothpaste — and, at the fad’s premium end, Radithor: triple-distilled water certified to contain real radium isotopes, sold at the price of a dollar a bottle by “Dr.” William Bailey of New Jersey, a Harvard dropout with no medical degree and a prior conviction for mail fraud. Radithor’s genius was honesty: unlike the quacks selling inert water, Bailey delivered exactly the poison on the label.
Eben Byers was the fad’s perfect customer: a Pittsburgh steel-company chairman, Yale man, socialite, and the 1906 US Amateur golf champion. After injuring his arm falling from a berth on a chartered train in 1927, and finding doctors slow, he took a physician’s suggestion of Radithor and became its apostle — drinking, by his own account, two to three bottles a day for years, sending cases to friends, business partners, and at least one of his racehorses. He consumed an estimated 1,400 bottles.
The arithmetic of the skeleton
Radium is chemically similar to calcium; the body banks it in bone, where it irradiates the marrow and the bone itself for the rest of the owner’s life — as the dial-painting Radium Girls’ litigation was demonstrating in the same years, had anyone connected a millionaire’s tonic to working women’s poisoning. By 1930 Byers’s teeth were falling out, his weight collapsing, his bones fracturing and dying. Surgeons removed most of his jaw. When a Federal Trade Commission lawyer took his deposition in 1931, the investigation’s report made him famous in ruin: a once-athletic man of fifty, unable to speak clearly, his skeleton disintegrating while his mind watched.
Byers died on 31 March 1932. The Wall Street Journal supplied the headline history kept: “The Radium Water Worked Fine Until His Jaw Came Off.” He was buried in a lead-lined coffin; exhumed in 1965 for study, his remains were still intensely radioactive.
What his death bought
A celebrity skeleton accomplished what dead factory girls had not quite managed. The FTC’s action shut Radithor down; the Food and Drug Administration’s impotence in the affair — it then had almost no power over such products — became a standing argument in the campaign that produced the far stronger Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. Radioactive patent medicine died with its best customer.
Bailey, who protested that he had drunk more Radithor than anyone and was never prosecuted, died of bladder cancer in 1949. His remains, examined later, were radioactive too.